DOGING diplomacy: When states start acting like businesses

Many academics will tell you that corporatisation wrecked academia - is diplomacy next?

The Trump Administration’s DOGE is a bull in the international relations China shop. It’s taken a wrecking ball to USAID, RFA, VOA, the Wilson Center and USIP - institutions of international relations that most of us grew up with and held to be inviolable. These institutions represented the best part of America - a narrative of peace, truth, justice, equality, democracy, and individual rights. Now, whether you believed it or not, that’s another story, but these and/or similar institutions were at the heart of this narrative and at the heart of the U.S. victory in the Cold War. Did anyone really think that the Wilson Center and USIP did anything but good?

Now, it’s no secret that governments around the world started to operate less like public institutions and more like corporations some time ago. From outsourcing essential services to adopting management jargon like “efficiency,” “performance,” and “customer service,” states have been reshaped by market logic.

Yet, arguably, one area th…